The Message from the Glaciers. By Orville Schell, NY Review of Books, May 27, 2010. "There was a time when the immensity of such larger-than-life features of our natural world as oceans, deserts, mountains, and glaciers evoked awe and even fear. These days, however, these once seemingly eternal and invincible aspects of our planet's architecture are on the defensive. And only belatedly are we beginning to understand how fragile and interconnected they actually are with myriad other elements of planetary life. Through new scientific data, scholarly articles, books, NGO studies, and media reports, we now know that the melting of polar ice will lead to rising ocean levels and the inundation of many heavily populated areas in vulnerable lowland countries. But we are only beginning to become acquainted with the less-well-known consequences that are starting to flow out of the majestic arc of mountains that begins in Inner Asia with the Tianshan Range in western China and then wraps itself around the western tier of the Tibetan Plateau as it becomes the Hindu Kush in northern Afghanistan. It then joins the Karakorum in northern Pakistan to become the Himalayas above Nepal, Bhutan, and India before ending with the Hengduan Range in southwest China.
"Scientists are now warning that there could be a 43% decrease in land mass covered with ice in these mountains by 2070 and that in numerous and complex ways this loss will affect Asia's ten major rivers -- the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya, and Tarim -- around which many of the ancient civilizations of the world arose. It is here, among huge modern-day populations of Asia, that the melting of the Greater Himalayas' glaciers will have the most significant impact during the coming decades and centuries. Recent revelations that the Fourth Assessment Report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) erroneously claimed that there was a 'likelihood' that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, 'and perhaps sooner,' embarrassed the report's authors; but they have not altered the reality that many glaciers in the region are, in fact, rapidly receding. Nor do they scientifically invalidate the panel's overall conclusion that because 'more than one-sixth of the world's population live in glacier- or snowmelt-fed river basins and will be affected by the seasonal shifts in stream flow,' a serious downstream problem is unfolding.
"Still, even as the scientific evidence of human impact on this defiant but delicate region piles up around us and we see the patrimony of these glaciers melt away before our eyes, we remain strangely reluctant to acknowledge how radically we have altered our relationship to this part of the natural world... There are, of course, many answers. But surely it is one of the great ironies of our age that even in the midst of the 'Information Technology Revolution,' which daily inundates us with vast quantities of information that are supposed to inform and liberate us, we are still unable to synthesize it so as to galvanize ourselves for action. There are many links in the chain of cause and effect that stretches from the melting glaciers of the Greater Himalayas to the Indian or Chinese peasant who relies on the waters of the Ganges or the Yellow River to survive. And many more studies should be undertaken to scientifically clarify all these links. But there is already enough information for the world to know that we confront a very dangerous prospect, with no adequate effort underway to find the missing link between the knowledge we already have and action."
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